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BloggingAbout.NET Rant

Today I am experiencing some very annoying problems with Community Server (CS) as currently configured on BloggingAbout.NET.

For as of yet unknown reasons the BA.NET engine has started to randomly remove src attributes of img tags when rendering my last blog post. In edit mode and preview mode my last post looks fine, but when published the images are missing. It seems to work if the src attribute is the first attribute of the img tag, so I tried to edit my post in source mode to rearrange the attributes. But unfortunately the editor configured at BA.NET decides to mess with my HTML and rearrange the attributes to its own liking just before a post is submitted to the server. So I am unable to get the images to show up ;(

I have had some problems in the past with Community Server. It kept messing with my HTML. The problem then was that CS was configured to filter out any style attributes on HTML elements. How annoying when creating your post post in Word and then copy-and-pasting. The HTML produced by Word 2003 is relatively decent and uses style attributes instead of font tags. I was then forced to use the WYSIWYG DHTML editor which has a very old-fashioned idea of decent HTML: font tags all over the place ;(

Another very annoying thing is that the hosting provider thinks 12:00 PM Central European Time is a good time to reboot the database server used by BA.NET. Probably because they think 3:00 AM Pacific Time is an okay time to do so since nobody is visiting the site in the middle of the night in California ;(

So is it time to seek my own hosting provider and control my own blogging engine? I don't know yet. Moving my old posts over to another blogging engine will probably be a royal pain-in-the-ass. Especially since I use the Gallery feature of Community Server quite a lot. And moving to another domain will probably mean loosing some readers, because my posts will no longer be aggregated on the BA.NET feed.

[Update 2005-11-15: The disappearing src attributes from img tags were caused by the installation of a prerelease of SP1 of Community Server 1.1. The problem is fixed now.]